"
Suddenly, in 1900, science raised its head and denied.
Yet, perhaps, after all, the change had not been so sudden as
it seemed. Real and actual, it certainly was, and every newspaper
betrayed it, but sequence could scarcely be denied by one who had
watched its steady approach, thinking the change far more
interesting to history than the thought. When he reflected about
it, he recalled that the flow of tide had shown itself at least
twenty years before; that it had become marked as early as 1893;
and that the man of science must have been sleepy indeed who did
not jump from his chair like a scared dog when, in 1898, Mme.
Curie threw on his desk the metaphysical bomb she called radium.
There remained no hole to hide in. Even metaphysics swept back
over science with the green water of the deep-sea ocean and no
one could longer hope to bar out the unknowable, for the
unknowable was known.
The fact was admitted that the uniformitarians of one's youth
had wound about their universe a tangle of contradictions meant
only for temporary support to be merged in "larger synthesis,"
and had waited for the larger synthesis in silence and in vain.
They had refused to hear Stallo. They had betrayed little
interest in Crookes. At last their universe had been wrecked by
rays, and Karl Pearson undertook to cut the wreck loose with an
axe, leaving science adrift on a sensual raft in the midst of a
supersensual chaos.
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